Survival and Sensemaking: Organizational Resilience in a Wall Street Trading Room After 9/11

How do organizations cope with extreme uncertainty? The existing literature is divided on this issue: some argue that organizations deal best with uncertainty in the environment by reproducing it in the organization, whereas others contend that the orga nization should be protected from the environment. In this paper we study the case of a Wall Street investment bank that lost its entire office and trading technology in the terrorist attack of September 11 th. The traders survived, but were forced to relocate to a makeshift trading room in New Jersey. During the six months the traders spent outside New York City, they had to deal with fears and insecurities inside the company as well as outside it: anxiety about additional attacks, questions of professional identity, doubts about the future of the firm, and ambiguities about the future re-location of the trading room. The firm overcame these uncertainties by protecting the traders' identities and their ability to engage in sensemaking. The organization held together through a leadership style that managed ambiguities and created the conditions for new solutions to emerge.

Caracterización de las almazaras cooperativas catalanas, análisis interno de la fase industrial o de transformación

En el presente artículo hemos tratado de analizar las características de las almazaras cooperativas catalanas con la finalidad de destacar no solamente sus elementos más importantes de gestión sino también sus principales debilidades.Las cooperativas se consideran instrumentos útiles para acometer políticas de desarrollo económico y bienestar social. A pesar de ello hay un gran debate abierto acerca de la eficiencia de estas organizaciones, que plantean el interrogante de si están en condiciones de competir con éxito en una economía cada vez más abierta, liberalizada y global. A través de las encuestas que hemos realizado al conjunto de las cooperativas oleícolas de Catalunya, hemos podido averiguar sus características distintivas, así como las principales desventajas y problemas a los que se enfrentan. Creemos puede ser de interés analizar las características de estas organizaciones, que tanto desde el punto de vista organizativo como de recursos humanos, como financiero, las hace diferentes de otro tipo de organizaciones pero que sin embargo, han de hacer frente a un mercado cada día más exigente y competitivo.

Caracterización de las almazaras cooperativas catalanas : análisis interno de la fase industrial o de transformación

En el presente artículo hemos tratado de analizar las características de las almazaras cooperativas catalanas con la finalidad de destacar no solamente sus elementos más importantes de gestión sino también sus principales debilidades. Las cooperativas se consideran instrumentos útiles para acometer políticas de desarrollo económico y bienestar social. A pesar de ello hay un gran debate abierto acerca de la eficiencia de estas organizaciones, que plantean el interrogante de si están en condiciones de competir con éxito en una economía cada vez más abierta, liberalizada y global. A través de las encuestas que hemos realizado al conjunto de las cooperativas oleícolas de Catalunya, hemos podido averiguar sus características distintivas, así como las principales desventajas y problemas a los que se enfrentan. Creemos puede ser de interés analizar las características de estas organizaciones, que tanto desde el punto de vista organizativo como de recursos humanos, como financiero, las hace diferentes de otro tipo de organizaciones pero que sin embargo, han de hacer frente a un mercado cada día más exigente y competitivo

Leadership and overcoming coordination failure with asymmetric costs

We study how the heterogeneity of agents affects the extent to which changes in financial incentives can pull a group out of a situation of coordination failure. We focus on the connections between cost asymmetries and leadership. Experimental subjects interact in groups of four in a series of weak-link games. The treatment variable is the distribution of high and low effort cost across subjects. We present data for one, two and three low-cost subjects as well as control sessions with symmetric costs. The overall pattern of coordination improvement is common across treatments. Early coordination improvements depend on the distribution of high and low effort costs across subjects, but these differences disappear with time. We find that initial leadership in overcoming coordination failure is not driven by low-cost subjects but by subjects with the most frequent cost. This conformity effect can be due to a kind of group identity or to the cognitive simplicity of acting with identical others.

Leadership in collective action

We extend the model of collective action in which groups compete for a budged by endogenizing the group platform, namely the specific mixture of public/private good and the distribution of the private good to group members which can be uniform or performance-based. While the group-optimal platform contains a degree of publicness that increases in group size and divides the private benefits uniformly, a success-maximizing leader uses incentives and distorts the platform towards more private benefits - a distortion that increases with group size. In both settings we obtain the anti-Olson type result that win probability increases with group size.

Revisiting the size-R&D productivity relation: introducing the mediating role of decision-making style on the scale and quality of innovative output

We develop a mediation model in which firm size is proposed to affect the scale and quality of innovative output through the adoption of different decision styles during the R&D process. The aim of this study is to understand how the internal changes that firms undergo as they evolve from small to larger organizations affect R&D productivity. In so doing, we illuminate the underlying theoretical mechanism affecting two different dimensions of R&D productivity, namely the scale and quality of innovative output which have not received much attention in previous literature. Using longitudinal data of Spanish manufacturing firms we explore the validity of this mediation model. Our results show that as firms evolve in size, they increasingly emphasize analytical decision making, and consequently, large-sized firms aim for higher-quality innovations while small firms aim for a larger scale of innovative output.

A Negotiation Style Recommender Based on Computational Ecology in Open Negotiation Environments

The system described herein represents the first example of a recommender system in digital ecosystems where agents negotiate services on behalf of small companies. The small companies compete not only with price or quality, but with a wider service-by-service composition by subcontracting with other companies. The final result of these offerings depends on negotiations at the scale of millions of small companies. This scale requires new platforms for supporting digital business ecosystems, as well as related services like open-id, trust management, monitors and recommenders. This is done in the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE), which is an open-source platform that allows agents, on behalf of small companies, to negotiate and use the ecosystem services, and enables the development of new agent technologies. The methods and tools of cyber engineering are necessary to build up Open Negotiation Environments that are stable, a basic condition for predictable business and reliable business environments. Aiming to build stable digital business ecosystems by means of improved collective intelligence, we introduce a model of negotiation style dynamics from the point of view of computational ecology. This model inspires an ecosystem monitor as well as a novel negotiation style recommender. The ecosystem monitor provides hints to the negotiation style recommender to achieve greater stability of an open negotiation environment in a digital business ecosystem. The greater stability provides the small companies with higher predictability, and therefore better business results. The negotiation style recommender is implemented with a simulated annealing algorithm at a constant temperature, and its impact is shown by applying it to a real case of an open negotiation environment populated by Italian companies

Endogenous price leadership

We consider a linear price setting duopoly game with di®erentiatedproducts and determine endogenously which of the players will lead andwhich will follow. While the follower role is most attractive for each firm, we show that waiting is more risky for the low cost firm so that,consequently, risk dominance considerations, as in Harsanyi and Selten(1988), allow the conclusion that only the high cost firm will choose towait. Hence, the low cost firm will emerge as the endogenous price leader.

Endogenous price leadership

We consider a linear price setting duopoly game with differentiated products and determine endogenously which of the players will lead and which will follow. While the follower role is most attractive for each firm, we show that waiting is more risky for the low cost firm so that, consequently, risk dominance considerations, as in Harsanyi and Selten (1988), allow the conclusion that only the highcost firm will choose to wait. Hence, the low cost firm will emerge as the endogenous price leader.

Endogenous Stackelberg leadership

We consider a linear quantity setting duopoly game and analyzewhich of the players will commit when both players have the possibility todo so. To that end, we study a 2-stage game in which each player caneither commit to a quantity in stage 1 or wait till stage 2. We show thatcommitting is more risky for the high cost firm and that, consequently,risk dominance considerations, as in Harsanyi and Selten (1988), allowthe conclusion that only the low cost firm will choose to commit.Hence, the low cost firm will emerge as the endogenous Stackelberg leader.

Macaulay style formulas for sparse resultants

We present formulas for computing the resultant of sparse polyno- mials as a quotient of two determinants, the denominator being a minor of the numerator. These formulas extend the original formulation given by Macaulay for homogeneous polynomials.

Time-related improvement of survival in resectable gastric cancer: the role of Japanese-style gastrectomy with D2 lymphadenectomy and adjuvant chemotherapy

Background: We investigated the change of prognosis in resected gastric cancer (RGC) patients and the role of radical surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy. Methods: We retrospectively analyze the outcome of 426 consecutive patients from 1975 to 2002, divided into 2 time-periods (TP) cohort: Before 1990 (TP1, n = 207) and 1990 or after (TP2; n= 219). Partial gastrectomy and D1-lymphadenetomy was predominant in TP1 and total gastrectomy with D2-lymphadenectomy it was in TP2. Adjuvant chemotherapy consisted of mitomycin C (MMC), 10¿20 mg/m2 iv 4 courses or MMC plus Tegafur 500 mg/m2 for 6 months. Results: Positive nodes were similar in TP2/TP1 patients with 56%/59% respectively. Total gastrectomy was done in 56%/45% of TP2/TP1 respectively. Two-drug adjuvant chemotherapy was administered in 65%/18% of TP2/TP1 respectively. Survival at 5 years was 66% for TP2 versus 42%for TP1 patients (p < 0.0001). Survival by stages II, IIIA y IIIB for TP2 versus TP1 patients was 70 vs. 51% (p = 0.0132); 57 vs. 22% (p = 0.0008) y 30 vs. 15% (p = 0.2315) respectively. Multivariate analysis showed that age, stage of disease and period of treatment were independent variables. Conclusion: The global prognosis and that of some stages have improved in recent years with case RGC patients treated with surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy.

Psychometric Properties of the Spanish Human System Audit Short-Scale of Transformational Leadership

The aim of this research is to examine the psychometric properties of a Spanish version of the Human System Audit transformational leadership short-scale (HSA-TFL-ES). It is based on the concept of Bass developed in 1985. The HSA-TFL is a part of the wider Human System Audit frame. We analyzed the HSA-TFL-ES in five different samples with a total number of 1,718 workers at five sectors. Exploratory Factor Analysis corroborated a single factor in all samples that accounted for 66% to 73% of variance. The internal consistency in all samples was good (α = .92 - .95). Evidence was found for the convergent validity of the HSA-TFL-ES and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. These results suggested that the HSA-TFL short-scale is a psychometrically sound measure of this construct and can be used for a combined and first overall measurement.